Saturday, April 15, 2017

A Response to Perry Marshall

Part of my response (in moderator limbo since the first week of April) to Perry Marshall's explanation is below. Marshall seems to argue on his blog that unless we attribute/limit all the intelligent design in macroevolutionary diversity to intelligence that is in the evolving organisms themselves, the recognition of intelligent design becomes a science-stopping God-of-the-gaps philosophy of science.

It is hard to understand your position in a way because sometimes you
seem to making a design argument, and sometimes you seem to be arguing
like Ken Miller that any influence God has had on history must somehow
be undetectable. [Note: Actually, this is probably more like a BioLogos argument; Miller might argue that God refused to interfere with history altogether before Biblical events.] Near as I can tell, your version of a 3rd way is an
attempt to keep theists from disengaging from the facts and/or basing
their faith on certain scientific mysteries remaining mysteries. I can
sympathize with that. In some ways you seem to be saying that the
evidence for intelligent design stands regardless of the time frame that
the information is put into the system. A lot of ID people would be on
board with you there—except that most wouldn’t _require_ that the
information be limited to the law-like behaviors of the universe and
have specific evidential reasons (which you and others may disagree
with) for rejecting that limitation.

Whether there is a coherent 3rd way depends on precisely what _is_
being added to the table and whether it is something more than a
porridge of what is already on the table. It depends on whether one is
proposing some sort of law that explains how watch-innovating factories
are plausible (not merely possible) with no guiding influence. The
reference to the Biocentrism book makes me suspect that the third thing
being put on the table is a conscious universe akin to the thoughts of
Thomas Nagel or Rupert Sheldrake, but somehow more dependent (in an
unclear way) on material mechanisms. The problem with Sheldrake’s ideas
(aside from the lack of academic engagement) is that they don’t present
anything more clear than I have so far heard about the third way,
although some of the things you’ve written sound like a front-loaded ID
position. Positing a consciousness in cells and then arguing that cells
can perform macroevolution over deep time because they are conscious,
creative geniuses — if that is the hypothesis — is an intriguing
hypothesis but seems like another extraordinary claim in need of
extraordinary evidence. If the “weak version” of 3rd Way is that
“consciousness needs to be considered as a fundamental part of the
problem and not merely epiphenomenal” then that much is easy to agree
with. If one is applying the same sort of “in[de]finite departure”
extrapolation to cell intelligence (as has been applied to mutation),
that is the thing to be proved and that potential explanation has its
own problems.

I would recommend Penrose’s Shadows of the Mind since he is grappling
there with whether consciousness or mathematical creativity can be fit
into the persistent preconceptions (i.e. current reductionist paradigms)
[of science] and what this means for science. This is something that continues to
intrigue me from a computer science point of view: Can insight be
estimated? I think that the answer is an affirmative but a highly
qualified one. The idea of a conscious cell requires a further question
to be answered: How would you distinguish between the insights
programmed into an agent (e.g. a learning algorithm) from the insights
gained by an agent through creative consciousness? And it begs the
question about what consciousness (if any) existed in the acellular
matrix that gave rise to a functional cell, or whether an essentially
robotic cell (a chemical automaton with exactly what computational
abilities?) can develop the power of insight through enough remixing of
its parts. If you are arguing that the kind of self-reprogramming that a
protozoan does must require some sort of non-algorithmic conscious
effort [more questions are begged--e.g. is a cumulative account of consciousness feasible as a truly testable theory?].

It would require a lot more words to adequately address why it is
important to distinguish what science can tell about the evidence for
deep intelligence and ultimately (non-scientifically) whether this
evidence tells us anything about the divine, but I think it is important
to carefully tease these apart. People have characterized this as a
political stunt by the Discovery Institute, but I think the exact
opposite is true. The political stunt has been the Darwinists staging
this as a conflict between doing “real” science and inferring a
Judaeo-Christian God. And in the larger public forum the matter
requires a straightforward conversation about whether the word
“supernatural” is at all a scientific concept, let alone a useful
scientific concept for criticizing ideas–whether it is being used to
rule out phenomena that are either (a) knowable but completely outside
current paradigms or (b) unknowable through scientific methods alone.
And, with respect to some of the questions that William Dembski has
raised about the nature of quantum events, what precisely (and isn’t
science supposed to be precise?) is meant by “direct intervention.”

That said, yes, not only does the implicit deism in methodological
naturalism smell like it’s _way_ past its due date, but––taking our
science hats off for the moment–that implicit deism _does_ take
something away from the Divine. I could be misunderstanding what your
position is, but to me it sounds like one is restricting God to forming
the law-like behaviors of the universe because if He were to do anything
else science becomes impossible somehow (and He’d better behave Himself
so scientists can get paychecks). It looks like a 3rd Way God can do
anything so long as he keeps all “intervention” (non-front-loaded
influence, presumably) and any evidence thereof to Himself. He can
create the universe and just let things go from there–and that’s all
(except maybe interfere in an undetectable way). I don’t see how the
hands-off argument for a supposedly bigger God has any more
philosophical backbone than when Erasmus Darwin pitched it. (If Erasmus’
poetry is any measure, it seemed [for him] to make God uncaring and make Nature glorious.) It doesn’t seem to accomplish anything _theologically_ other
than conjuring a more distant, less involved creator. [e.g. Erasmus' "distant deity"]

For me there are even more fundamental questions (to the evolution
debate) than all these scientific and metaphysical questions: _Who_
decides what “real science” is and _who_ gets to put things on the table
for further study? What I’m tired of more than anything is the fascism
of dictating to the community how to approach science and bullying and
deriding people who approach it differently. Ever since Charles Darwin
biologists have been basing their historical arguments, explicitly or
implicitly, on what a creator would or wouldn’t do rather than on what
evidence suggests itself. I think we’re all entitled to whatever
philosophical baggage we choose; it’s the imposing of certain
philosophical baggage (e.g. materialism) on the community and calling
this imposition science that is the science-stopper. Once the public
realizes that there are other scientific studies to spend their money on
than bankrolling more expensive reductionist flapdoodle, on whose
science will they actually want their money spent? Who will decide
where that lovely green stuff gets spent?

I tend to look at the enterprise of biology as somewhat of a mining
expedition. For decades there’s been certain passages sealed off
because, so we’re told, there’s nothing to see down there, it’s a waste
of time, it’s a mining-stopper, etc. Nobody’s allowed down there
because nothing will come of it but a waste of resources—so _no one_ is
allowed to try. I think there’s plenty of room for neo-Darwinism, 3rd
way, 4th way, self-organization, quantum synthesis, or whatever
approach. But a 3rd Way that is [merely] NOMA with ID frosting on top still
tastes like NOMA. NOMA didn’t inspire materialists to keep religion out
of science; it just rationalized making theists do science that
amounted to a secular religion.

Some of what I heard sounds a little like “Boy these scientists are so
afraid that if they tell the public the truth, people will stop letting
us do their thinking for them and gravitate to Intelligent Design.” If
that’s what they are afraid of, maybe they should bravely tell the
public the truth now, while they have a smidgeon of credibility left,
before they make this a self-fulfilling prophecy. Most of them still
talk as though they accept this neo-Darwinist pablum, and science
programs are _still_ churning out acolytes that think in lockstep from
the ideological mill. Whether they really do buy this stuff or they
misrepresent themselves for fear and loathing of the very people whose
money they are spending, it still undermines all confidence in the
community of biologists. Without a free market, a 3rd way is just the
same old presumption and arrogant extrapolations with new purported
mechanisms, and if it becomes the main item on the shelf it’s not
because it’s so darn good.